Photo by David Suarez on Unsplash
You weren’t there. You were staying with your parents’ that night. So it was just me, Missy, and Roger in my apartment. I had moved my laptop and the extension cable to my bed so we could sit at the table. All that was on the table were three tall cans of beer. We put our elbows on the table. We were close enough to smell each other’s breaths. The feeling was fine and strange, intimate even, especially during this time in the world when being within another person’s breathing distance is so dangerous. I noticed Missy had a pair of sunglasses perched on her head. “Nice glasses,” I said.
Missy giggled. “Do you know where I got these?” She didn’t wait for me to answer and said, “Roger.” Then she turned to Roger and smiled. Their noses were about an inch apart. Roger didn’t smile.
“You bought her those glasses?” I said.
Roger shook his head and looked down at the tall can he cupped with both hands. “I didn’t buy her anything.”
Glancing at her, then back at him, then back at her, I said, “What, he gave them to you but didn’t buy them? Did he steal them?”
“He didn’t give them to me.”
“This needs explaining,” I said, raising my eyebrows. But I didn’t really care. I was just happy to be getting drunk with coworker friends. It was December, Christmas was two weeks away. I was happy about winter vacation, happy the COVID numbers were near nothing in the area, happy that after the grading period, I wouldn’t have to teach students on Zoom for a few months.
Missy lowered her head and removed the glasses from her hair, carefully, like the pair was a tiara. With both hands, she rotated the sunglasses to face her so she could read the brand. She said the brand name out loud, but I can’t remember what it was. I don’t think it’s important. “I always wanted a pair like this,” she said to the glasses. “I had asked Roger to buy me a pair, but he never would. I don’t think he ever paid attention to me, did you, honey?” She nudged her husband.
He burped and kept his eyes on his beer can. “We’ve been married three years,” he said.
“It’s not a long time, is it?” Missy said and looked at my blue ceiling. “Back when we were both teaching in North Carolina, there was this one day I went to his truck and opened the console. I had stuffed the electric bill in there. I had planned to pay it, but I’d nearly forgotten about it. It was nearly past due. Well, what did I see when I opened the console? These glasses, just sitting on a stack of envelopes.” She turned the lenses to face me. Then she put the glasses on. “How do I look?” she asked.
I smiled. The glasses looked pretty ordinary to me. But I wanted to be nice. “You look like one cool customer,” I said. Then I forced out a breath and said, “So how did the glasses get there?”
The question came out bluntly but didn’t seem to bother Missy. She shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“We don’t know,” said Roger, and he shrugged and looked me in the eye. I don’t know what innocent eyes look like, but his looked innocent, I guess, like a dog’s when he tries a new thing and looks at you to ask, “Is this all right?” Maybe if you were there, you would have been able to read him. Maybe if you had seen him, you would have noticed something I didn’t.
When they left, the story got me thinking about the two of them, what kind of married couple they were. Before bed, a little drunk, I brushed my teeth and shook my head in disbelief in front of the mirror and thought, It’s obvious. It’s obvious how the glasses got there. But then once I spit into the sink and washed out my mouth, I thought, Is it so obvious? I moved the laptop and the extension cable from the bed back to the table, where nine tall cans of beer stood empty. Then I turned out the lights and lay down on the bed. As I pulled the comforter up to my chest, I got to thinking about the two of us, and our engagement. And this question. Imagine you were in Missy’s situation. Would you want to know where the glasses came from?
Billie Pritchett is an assistant professor of English at Kyungnam University in Masan, Korea. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from Murray State University. His work is forthcoming in Concho River Review and Delmarva Review.